Guest Posting Standards

Perhaps this is a stupid question, but what is the norm for submitting a guest post?

PDF, word file, raw text in email, etc...?

I ask because I'm not sure how I should do the headings, links, bold/italicized words, etc... basically, things that require HTML tags.

there's no norm. You either comply with the guidelines / requests of the site's editor / owner, or - if their guidelines are not strict / non-existent - you negotiate your own terms since you are the one paying them to publish your content.

Although, the format of the file in which you send the content doesn't matter most of the time. I've seen people that are extremely specific even with how you send them the content, but such people are rare (at least I've not seen many of them), most of the time they're OK with accepting whichever format you want to send your content in...

Regarding the formatting... like I said, some of them are very strict and for those cases you simply comply with their demands if you want to publish your content on their sites. But if they don't have strict requirements you're free to format your content however you like, you can even give them a simple .txt file and a link and tell them...

"hey, man! Thanks for accepting to publish my guest post, here's the content and the link, you can format them however you want to match your site, all I need - as you can guess - is that the link works correctly and it's a d0follow. You're in the same business as I am, so I'm pretty sure you know how to deal with this stuff

Or, if you absolutely need me to format the content in a certain way just let me know and I'll get it back to you in the final form.... Also, let me know if there are things I've missed / need to pay attention to. And thanks again for the backlink, I really appreciate it..."

Each webmaster / editor is a real person, and each one of them have their own rules / requirements / guidelines, so just comply with them if such rules exist, otherwise simply ask them if there are any rules, and if they say "no" just send them the file / content / links in whichever format you want...

EDIT: of course, the template above is personal, if you need it to read professionally you will obviously have to edit it a little bit

Word document is the standard. Add h1 h2 h3 there:
To make sure it works just copy paste your word document to a WordPress post and check.

dragonboas said:

Perhaps this is a stupid question, but what is the norm for submitting a guest post?

PDF, word file, raw text in email, etc...?

I ask because I'm not sure how I should do the headings, links, bold/italicized words, etc... basically, things that require HTML tags.

Click to expand...

Probably the word document is the standard form.